Back in 2011, I wrote about a song I remembered from primary school. It came from some sort of musical about a songwriting competition, in which one character wrote a beautiful song about a blackbird and another, less scrupulous character tried to steal it. To counter this, the protagonist wrote a decoy dirge-like song with the aim of that being stolen by the villain. I could remember the tune clearly (not hard, it was one note!) and, more remarkably, four lines of the lyric:
The blackbird sings a tuneful song, With turns and trills so fine; Such skill has he, such majesty, But it’s not as good as mine.
What I could not remember was what the musical was called, who had written it, or where our school had obtained it. Nobody else I spoke to seemed to recognise it. Internet searches produced nothing, and so the song remained one of those odd fragments of childhood that somehow survive after almost everything surrounding them has disappeared.
Fourteen years later, in December 2025, I returned to the mystery. The internet had grown considerably since 2011, but the blackbird song remained stubbornly absent from it. I wrote a follow-up post, partly to gather together what little I knew and partly in the hope that someone else might eventually type one of those remembered lines into a search engine and find me.
That is exactly what happened.
In January, Paul left a comment saying that he remembered the song too. He believed it had been performed by Lucie Skeaping in a BBC schools programme called The Music Arcade, sometime around 1983 or 1984. He also remembered a character called Harlequin.
That last detail helped to unlock some more fragments from my memory. Once Paul had supplied the name, more of the story began to fall into place: Harlequin was trying to trick Pantaloon in a song competition.
There was a slight complication, though. Harlequin and Pantaloon aren’t exactly obscure characters. They go back to the Italian commedia dell’arte tradition and became familiar figures in British harlequinades and pantomime. So adding Harlequin and Pantaloon to my searches wasn’t quite the breakthrough it might have seemed.
Still, Paul independently remembering the same song, the same characters and The Music Arcade was far more than I’d had before.
Paul and I exchanged a few emails at the time, comparing memories and trying to pin down the programme. It was already enormously satisfying simply to discover that somebody else remembered the same thing. This was no longer an obscure childhood memory that apparently belonged only to me. Paul remembered it too.
At that point, though, we still didn’t have a recording, or anything else that definitively proved we’d landed on the right thing.
Then, completely out of the blue, another email from Paul arrived today.
He had been looking through some old cassette tapes for something entirely unrelated when he came across an unmarked tape. On it were recordings from The Music Arcade — including the blackbird song!
Even more wonderfully, he remembered our exchange from seven months earlier and took the trouble to convert the recordings to MP3 and send them to me.
Bless him for that.
The first recording even comes complete with an unmistakable bit of BBC continuity:
“This is Daytime on Two. Time now to visit The Music Arcade, to listen to some vocal sounds.”
Hearing that alone is oddly transporting. There is something about the sound of old BBC schools television — the continuity voice, the slightly formal presentation, the piano and orchestral arrangement — that instantly evokes classrooms, television trolleys and programmes watched in the middle of an ordinary school day.
And then there’s the song itself.
It is exactly the song I remembered, albeit with a female vocalist, while the version in my head has always featured a male voice — presumably one of our teachers.
There are a few more orchestral flourishes than our primary-school production managed, unsurprisingly, but the tune (or lack thereof) is unmistakable. More gratifyingly still, the lyrics I had been carrying around in my head for all those years weren’t merely close. They were spot on:
The blackbird sings a tuneful song, With turns and trills so fine; Such skill has he, such majesty, But it’s not as good as mine!
When Paul first commented, he wondered whether the third line might have been “such talent has he, such artistry”. It turns out that, on this occasion at least, my memory had preserved the original wording with remarkable accuracy.
The recordings also confirm the wider story. Harlequin is trying to trick Pantaloon in a song competition, and the rival composition really is the deliberately dreadful one-note song I remembered. After decades of wondering whether I had merged several childhood memories together, there it all is: Harlequin, Pantaloon, the blackbird, the stolen song, the competition and the gloriously terrible alternative.
There is something rather strange about hearing a piece of music that has existed for so long only as an internal recording. Usually, rediscovering something from childhood reveals how much memory has altered it. The voice is different, the tempo is wrong, or the remembered fragment turns out to bear only a passing resemblance to the real thing.
In this case, pressing play didn’t replace my memory with the original. It confirmed that the original had been there all along.
The ending is also almost comically appropriate. In my previous post, while describing how easily school music vanished in the years before digital archives, I wrote:
Fold up the lyric sheets. Box up the cassette. Move on to the next term’s topic.
And that, apparently, is more or less what happened.
The recording survived not in an online archive or a carefully labelled collection, but on an unmarked cassette Paul happened to find while searching for something else.
The cassette had been boxed up. It was simply waiting for the right person to open the box again.
My original 2011 post was effectively a message in a bottle. Fourteen years later, I sent out another one. This time Paul found it. His own memory led him to the blog, and months afterwards a chance encounter with an anonymous cassette completed the story.
So the lost blackbird song is lost no longer.
And after all these years, the blackbird still sings a tuneful song — with turns and trills so fine.
Huge thanks to Paul for reaching out and sharing these recordings. Maybe we aren’t the only two people out there with this song living rent-free in our heads, and this will prove some kind of therapy for others!
After spending much of the last few weeks walking around places that formed the backdrop to my childhood, I decided to head into Sneinton. The route would take me through the streets towards Colwick Country Park, loop around near Colwick Hall, hopacross into Bakersfield and then take me through the now increasingly familiar Colwick woods before eventually depositing me back in Sneinton again.
Sneinton is an interesting place to revisit because, growing up in Nottingham, it was one of those areas that came with a certain ‘reputation’.
Nottingham has several of them – although some have names that are frankly guilty of false advertising. To the unwary visitor, The Meadows sounds delightful. St Ann’s could be the quiet cloisters of an Oxbridge college. Forest Fields or Hyson Green evoque imagery of idyllic greenery, and Bestwood could probably be marketed as an exclusive new housing development without changing the name.
Sneinton, on the other hand, always sounded exactly like it appeared.
Particularly when pronounced properly. Not Sneen-ton like your sat nav might say, or somebody encountering the name for the first time might reasonably attempt, but Snenton. Preferably delivered quickly and in a Nottingham accent.
As kid in the 1980s I remember it as a slightly run-down inner-city area of Victorian terraces with a substantial Asian community, the sort of place that felt busy and slightly chaotic without necessarily being somewhere you’d choose to visit unless you had a reason.
We did have a reason.
For several years my brother and I attended Nottingham Olympic Judo Club on St. Stephen’s Road, under the watchful eyes of our senseis John Mewett and Dave Lawrence. Consequently Sneinton became somewhere we visited regularly, Mum dutifully taking us on Saturdays, although my mental map of it was probably little more than the journey there, the dojo itself and whatever I happened to notice through the car window along the way.
Walking down St. Stephen’s Road again, I deliberately went looking for it. It’s flats now.
There’s something oddly disconcerting about discovering that a building which occupies a perfectly solid place in your memory has simply ceased to perform the function you assigned to it. Somewhere behind those windows somebody might now go to bed in the spot where I first mastered tsuri goshi, or might take a leisurely dump where at birthday parties hosted there we’d abuse the giant inflatables to embark on ‘moonrides’ – nearly putting some of the smaller guests through the ceiling at one point!
The street itself immediately triggered another memory though. The faces.
As a child I’d noticed many of the houses around here had human faces staring out from the stonework. They’re still there. Stern-looking carved heads tucked beneath the decorative stonework around front doors, apparently watching generations of Sneintonians go about their daily business.
I always wondered who they were. Kings? Local dignitaries? The people who built the houses? Particularly unfortunate former residents who had annoyed the architect?
It turns out I’m far from the first person to notice them. Sneinton has quite a collection of these carved heads and St. Stephen’s Road is apparently particularly well endowed with them. Some look vaguely like ancient warriors, others like rather severe Victorian interpretations of people from the past, but as far as I can establish there isn’t a neat answer to the question that occupied the younger me.
They’re just… faces.
Which is simultaneously disappointing and rather wonderful. They’ve probably been staring at children walking past whilst wondering who they were for considerably longer than I’ve been alive.
Sneinton itself looked surprisingly familiar too.
The Victorian streets remain. It still feels densely packed and bustling and proudly multicultural. The Asian community I remember from childhood is still very evident, particularly the Pakistani influence, but there are now Eastern European shops and businesses mixed amongst it too. Languages and people have changed while the streets containing them largely haven’t.
That’s perhaps what I found most interesting. Sneinton hasn’t really become somewhere else. It’s simply accumulated more Sneinton.
That isn’t to say nothing has changed. Slightly off my walking route is Sneinton Market, which has undergone a transformation that would have seemed utterly implausible to the younger me. Today it’s a fashionable little enclave of independent businesses, food, drink and creative spaces. This is emphatically not the Sneinton Market I remember.
My Sneinton Market was somewhere you went to buy something electrical for 99p while accepting there was a reasonable possibility it might stop being electrical before you got it home. For some reason I have a particularly vivid memory of headphones with orange foam earpieces. They were cheap, probably sounded dreadful and presumably survived until approximately Wednesday.
Nobody was drinking artisan coffee whilst I was buying them.
The funny thing about walking Sneinton today, though, is just how quickly the city starts to disappear.
Heading along the green route eastwards, tightly packed streets give way to twitchels and finally more open space and tree-lined footpaths until suddenly you’re in Colwick Country Park. It’s remarkably easy to forget how close the Trent Valley and all that greenery are to this part of inner Nottingham.
The park itself is comparatively young. It opened in the late 1970s after former gravel workings were landscaped, but the land you’re walking through has a much longer history. The wider estate around Colwick Hall stretches back centuries, and this was parkland long before anyone thought of creating a country park. That might explain one of the things I stumbled across.
In amongst the trees I found an old brick wall, smothered in ivy and pierced by what looks very much like a former gateway. There’s no grand building immediately behind it, no helpful plaque explaining what it once enclosed and nothing obvious to tell the passing walker why it’s there at all.
Naturally, I love this. Abandoned things and mystery. That’s very much my jam!
I don’t know exactly what it is. Given the history of the surrounding land, it may be a surviving fragment associated with the old Colwick Hall estate, but for now I’d rather leave a question mark beside it than manufacture a history simply because it would be convenient to have one. Sometimes finding something you can’t immediately explain is half the fun of wandering.
More annoyingly, I also discovered afterwards I’d walked agonisingly close to the abandoned St. John the Baptist church near Colwick Hall without realising it was there. Had I known, there is absolutely no possibility I’d have walked past it – that one is going onto the list for another day.
From Colwick Park my route eventually carried me over towards Bakersfield and back through Colwick Woods, somewhere I’ve already written about. This time the woods weren’t the destination, they were simply somewhere I happened to pass through on the way back to the car. Oddly, I quite liked that.
Having recently spent a chunk of time trogging around them for childhood memories, this time I could just walk through them again. They’d returned to being part of the landscape rather than a historical exhibit I’d constructed in my own head.
Then, eventually, Sneinton swallowed me again.
There was one more familiar landmark waiting near the end of the walk, although at the moment you’d be forgiven for not immediately recognising it.
Green’s Windmill is currently swaddled in white sheeting while maintenance work takes place, looking less like one of Nottingham’s most distinctive landmarks and more like somebody has put an enormous bag over it. Underneath all that material, though, is another place that reaches straight back into my childhood.
The windmill was another memorable if not regular haunt.
As children, of course, it was simply the windmill. Somewhere Mum or Dad could take us, somewhere you could look inside, look at the scientific exhibits in the museum or – more likely – decamp to the children’s play area and burn off excess energy. Only later do you discover that the place has a rather more remarkable story.
The original tower mill was built by George Green Sr in the early nineteenth century, and his son George worked there before becoming one of Nottingham’s more unlikely contributors to the history of science. With relatively little formal education, Green produced mathematical work on electricity and magnetism that was largely overlooked during his lifetime but would eventually become enormously influential. Today Green’s theorem and Green’s functions carry the name of a Nottingham miller’s son around the world.
Which makes the fact that I basically knew the place as somewhere that was fun to play with plasma balls or on the playground perhaps more than a little ignorant!
So next time you’re tempted to think disparaging thoughts about Sneinton, remember that one of the most important mathematical physicists of the nineteenth century emerged not from some grand academic institution, but from a miller’s family on a Nottingham hillside.
After the Greens, their mill had a rather eventful afterlife: falling out of use, losing its sails, suffering a fire and spending decades as an abandoned shell before being restored and reopened in the 1980s. Which isn’t far off when I first encountered it.
Perhaps that’s the thing I hadn’t appreciated about Sneinton when I was younger. I knew it as somewhere slightly rough around the edges where we went to judo. I knew the terraces, the Asian shops, the market selling questionably inexpensive electrical goods, the windmill on the hill and those mysterious stone faces staring down from the houses.
I hadn’t really noticed how many different landscapes and stories were squeezed together around it.
Within one walk I’d passed Victorian terraces, the ghosts of my old judo club, Pakistani and Eastern European shops, a country park, mysterious estate walls, lakes, the edge of an old country house, ancient woodland and the temporarily bagged up remains of a windmill that once belonged to a largely self-taught mathematical genius.
And yet somehow it all fits together.
As a kid I used to joke that Sneinton (Snenton, remember) sounded exactly like what it was. Walking around it again all these years later, I’m not entirely sure what I thought that meant. It’s untidy in places, of course. But it’s also colourful, busy, old, multicultural. Occasionally it’s beautiful, and occasionally perhaps lacking a bit of care. It has changed enormously in some ways, and hardly at all in others.
Perhaps the little stone faces opposite the old dojo on St. Stephen’s Road understand it better than I do.
They were there when I walked past them as a boy on my way to judo. The windmill was up on the hill. They’re both still there now, while the dojo has become flats, the market has discovered artisan food, new communities have arrived and I’ve somehow become the middle-aged bloke wandering around taking photographs of all of it.
I still don’t know who the faces are supposed to be.
But I do rather like the fact they’re still watching.
Goddammit 
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